If you could ask an astronaut anything at all, what would it be?
Among our panelists is Anna Fisher, the first mother in space, pictured here in the 1980s (John Bryson photo).
On Tuesday, you can ask them yourself. One hundred astronauts are gathering at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology on September 22, and four of them will join me for an online Google Hang to take your questions about what it is like working and living in space.
What do astronauts think about when you’re not working? What is like to see your country so far away, on a distant blue orb? How do you clean a space station, and how often? Do you get anxious in space?
Submit your questions using the Google Hang Q&A app … since we will not be inviting any viewers to join the hang.
We intend to explore the inspirational and practical aspects of living and working in space and space exploration, and what these reveal about our common humanity and its relationship to the planet Earth.
The entire webcast will take about 30 minutes, inside the KTH university library, beginning at 13:30 and ending at 14:30.
Don Pettit Selected by NASA in April 1996, Pettit reported to the Johnson Space Center in August 1996. A veteran of three spaceflights, He has logged more than 370 days in space and over 13 EVA (spacewalk) hours. He lived aboard the International Space Station for 5-1/2 months during Expedition 6, was a member of the STS-126 crew, and again lived aboard the station for 6-1/2 months as part of the Expedition 30/31 crew.
Anousheh Ansari On September 18, 2006, a few days after her 40th birthday, Anousheh Ansari became the first Muslim woman in space. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space traveler, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station. Ansari was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1967. She emigrated to the United States in 1984 and became a naturalized citizen. Ansari holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from George Mason University and a master’s degree from George Washington University.
Luca Parmitano Luca Parmitano is a major in the Italian Air Force. He has logged more than 2000 hours flying time, is qualified on more than 20 types of military airplanes and helicopters, and has flown over 40 types of aircraft. Parmitano was selected as an ESA astronaut in May 2009. In February 2011, he was assigned as a flight engineer to Italian space agency ASI’s first long-duration mission on the International Space Station. He was launched on a Soyuz launcher from Baikonur, Kazakhstan on 28 May 2013. Parmitano spent 166 days in space conducting over 20 experiments and took part in two spacewalks and the docking of four spacecraft for his Volare mission. He landed safely back on Earth on 11 November 2013.
Anna Fisher Anna Fisher was among the first several women selected by NASA to fly to space. Fisher is a chemist, a medical doctor, specializing in emergency medicine, and a NASA astronaut. During her career at NASA, she has been involved with three major programs: the Shuttle Program, the International Space Station, and NASA’s new crew-rated spacecraft – Orion.
I chatted with Christer Fuglesang, Sweden’s first astronaut and an adjunct professor here at KTH, about the upcoming conference, which involves a significant number of the world’s most experienced space travelers.
DC: What’s the ASE Planetary Congress all about? CF: We have about 100 astronauts and cosmonauts coming to Sweden for this annual event. Some of our goals for the conference are to maintain our network and to meet and discuss matters involving space exploration. We have technical presentations on space life and space research, and we make these open to the public. They’ll be streamed live online, too, so anyone to listen to them — not just astronauts.
And, very importantly, we have a community day when astronauts visit local schools and universities and talk about their experience and inspire young people. That’s why in Sweden, we’re calling this year’s conference, “Inspired by Space”. We’ll also have a live Q&A online with four astronauts, where students of all ages can submit questions about what it is like to work, and live, in space.
Our final goal is to show these prominent people the very best of Sweden, highlighting our industry, culture and nature. Most of the astronauts bring their spouses, and they get a nice program too, with more of the nature and cultural exposure.
You get to meet colleagues from all around the world, and you have this informal exchange of ideas and knowledge, plus there are great presentations on the latest in space development and research. Then you also get to experience a different country.
DC: Why is it important to keep the space explorers’ network active? CF: We believe that we can have some influence on the future of spaceflight, and we believe that more people will listen to us when we talk about space research, as well as problems on Earth. It’s easy for astronauts to get heard; and by meeting, we can help each other formulate this message and make it even stronger by coordinating it.
One of the issues we are pushing quite hard on is the threat of asteroids and meteors. There are a lot of heavenly bodies out there and sometimes they hit Earth. And, unfortunately we have not made enough of an effort to try to detect and observe more of them and to have an action plan for deflecting asteroids.
Close to 1,000 of people were injured when the Chelyabinsk asteroid hit Russia without warning a few years ago. But a potentially more catastrophic impact event was the Tunguska meteor in 1908. If it had hit a city — and today we have more and more big cities — it could have killed millions of people.
DC: So you have lots of professional knowledge sharing there. But besides that, what is it like when astronauts get together? It seems like a very special group of people. CF: Well, you do have a certain special affinity with one another — a special togetherness because you shared something that few people get the chance to do. From space you have seen the Earth and experienced weightlessness.
DC: You’ve been to several of these conferences. What highlights stand out in your memory? CF: I have been to six of these. There were a couple of events that really stand out. When Malaysia hosted the ASE, one of the Malaysian astronauts was getting married at the conclusion of the conference, and we were all invited. It was a huge event. And in Saudi Arabia, it was very interesting to see the investment in education there. It’s always interesting to share our experiences in other countries and by doing this we help to create understanding between cultures throughout the world.
After all, it’s one globe. You see it from up there, and you talk about that and travel the world and share these values of working together and cooperation.
David Callahan
The ASE XXVIII Planetary Congress begins with an opening ceremony at 9 a.m., September 21, at the Stockholm Concert Hall, and then continues at KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a technical session at 2 p.m. on Advances in European Space Exploration, in Auditorium F1.
The Association of Space Explorers (ASE) is an international nonprofit professional and educational organization of over 395 astronauts and cosmonauts from 36 nations. ASE supports the advancement of space exploration by providing opportunities for communication among space professionals at the international level and seeks to stimulate interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and inspire in students a life-long commitment to educational excellence. Every year members from ASE gather in one country to exchange, spread and create new knowledge.
Stephen Hawking just delivered a status report on the search for a solution to the information loss paradox, at the conclusion of a weeklong conference being held at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
The conference was sponsored by Nordita, a theoretical physics research center co-driven by KTH and Stockholm University. The organizer was Laura Mersini-Houghton, an internationally-renowned theoretical physicist at University of North Carolina who assembled 30 of the world’s top physicists for the conference in Sweden.
Stephen Hawking makes his presentation today at an extraordinary gathering of world-leading physicists at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. (Photo: Håkan Lindgren)
It might not settle the argument over what happens to information trapped in black holes, but Stephen Hawking’s new theory dominated the discussion today at a specially-convened meeting of world-leading physicists, held at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Black holes don’t actually swallow and destroy physical information, according to a theory Hawking proposed at the Hawking Radiation conference. Instead, they store it in a two-dimensional hologram, and then it gets severely jumbled up.
You might ask yourself why this distinction matters, but it addresses one of the most baffling questions facing a generation of physicists: What happens to the information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes? Is it destroyed, as our understanding of general relativity would predict?
If so, that would violate the laws of quantum mechanics. So, which theory of physics is right? Hawking’s answer appears to be they both are.
Hawking is in town for the weeklong conference, which is co-sponsored by Nordita, UNC and the Julian Schwinger Foundation. Nordita is co-hosted by KTH and Stockholm University. Internationally renowned UNC Physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton organized and assembled 30 of the world’s leading physicists to tackle the problem, which stems from contradictions between quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Everything in our world is encoded with quantum mechanical information; and according to the laws of quantum mechanics, this information should never entirely disappear, no matter what happens to it. Not even if it gets sucked into a black hole.
But Hawking has dropped the idea that the information goes down the hole. His new idea is that the information doesn’t make it inside the black hole at all. Instead, it’s permanently encoded in a 2D hologram at the surface of the black hole’s event horizon, or the field surrounding each black hole which represents its point of no return.
As we understand them, black holes are regions of space-time where stars, having exhausted their fuel, collapse under their own gravity, creating a bottomless pit that swallows anything approaching too closely. Not even light can escape them, since their gravitational pull is so infinitely powerful.
“The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary — the event horizon,” he said. Working with Cambridge Professor Malcolm Perry (who spoke afterward) and Harvard Professor Andrew Strominger, Hawking formulated the idea that information is stored in the form of what are known as super translations.
“The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles,” Hawking said. “Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.”
This information is emitted in the quantum fluctuations that black holes produce, albeit in “chaotic, useless form,” Hawking said. “For all practical purposes the information is lost.”
But in his lecture in Stockholm the previous night, Hawking also offered compelling thoughts about where things that fall into a black hole could eventually wind up.
“The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible,” Hawking said. “The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe.
“So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.”
The Hawking Radiation conference is co-sponsored by Nordita, UNC and the Julian Schwinger Foundation. Nordita is co-hosted by KTH and Stockholm University.
Stephen Hawking took the floor today at the Hawking Radiation conference to explain his latest idea about how quantum-mechanical information can escape being lost in a black hole. The presentation was made today during the Hawking Radiation conference being held at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Hawking is in town for a weeklong conference on the information loss paradox, which was organized by UNC Physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton. She assembled 32 of the world’s leading physicists on the campus of KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The Hawking Radiation conference is co-sponsored by Nordita, UNC and the Julian Schwinger Foundation. Nordita is co-hosted by KTH and Stockholm University.
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